Is my bitterness showing? All of the things we saw with other bands were, of course, just background noise to the fact that getting on Recordead Records got us one step closer to being in the same room with DED. Who, I am willing to wager, were at one point the biggest douches in their neighbourhoods.
And I have to digress about Tom Manic too. Chest hair and woodpecker nose aside, he really did believe in Colostomy Hag and, from everything I can tell, we got a decent and fair deal from him. We didn’t have a manager. It was always Socks who stood at the helm of our business decision-making. But he never led us wrong, so we signed with Recordead for a three-album contract.
Scream into This ended up being released with all the songs we’d been playing for over a year. We’d already released it ourselves, of course, but Tom had us re-record it at a better studio. I scorned the whole thing — especially when the guy in the studio asked me if I wanted the lava lamp on — but the recordings do sound a hell of a lot better than our demos.
In case you don’t know — whatever a band does, the record label advances them the money. And then they recoup it. So when a band gets a chunk of money to do an album — paying for things like studio time, or a producer, et cetera — the label will get every penny back from record sales. Same with touring. It can get really complex, but let me just say that the band gets paid last. The label recoups, the sound guy gets paid, the bus driver gets paid, the merch person gets paid, everybody gets paid, and then whatever scraps are left, the band gets. That’s because it’s our investment. Besides, why should an artist need money for doing something they love doing?
We did some awesome photo shoots, and there were some just of me (one that made the cover of Smasher magazine of me holding a sword) and some of me and Fern, naturally. One photographer guy wanted both of us to wear these weird metal bikini things. Fern was pretty into the idea for some reason. It weirded me out. One minute she wasn’t talking, the next she was dolling up in that crap. I definitely wasn’t into it. There was nothing else for me to wear, so I ended up yanking this white sheer curtain off the window and wrapping myself in it like a shroud. Fern looked pretty good in that bikini, which is probably why she started showing up in all that “sexy women in rock” stuff. It’s weird though, because I’d get mentioned in that garbage too. I guess all you have to do, really, is be female and show up.
One photographer who contacted us was particularly cool. She had a lot of ideas for band pictures, and all of them were pretty awesome, but naturally I love the one that I had suggested the most: us doing a reenactment of Judith slaying Holofernes. It was amazing getting to physically act out those parts for the shots — Fern holding Socks down on a bed, me bringing up the knife, and Edgar holding a candle, looking on, like some sort of guard. Of course there is no guard in the original painting, and Socks isn’t anything like the Holofernes I’ve imagined, but I wore blue and Fern wore red and the image is dimly lit and the bed has long white curtains and the pictures are amazing.
So what if so many of these pictures end up being used now to illustrate the crimes Fern and I have committed? PROPHETIC, the headlines read, but in all honesty I don’t know how realistic killing anyone was to me at that time. I don’t know what was going on in Fern’s mind. I’d definitely had my share of fantasies, and there was a hate burning inside me that would creep up at night, crawl up my throat like bile, almost burning. And then I would turn around and pour it into another Colostomy Hag design or another song idea.
I guess I was walking a thin line then, between trying to forget what had happened — quash it and compress it into a tiny little box — and then giving in to that sick fury. I’d let myself feel it a little sometimes, and my vision would go blurry, and my chest would tighten, and I’d press my lips together hard to keep myself from screaming till I was hoarse. And, of course, I would dig my fingernails into my palm and focus on the sting, and that would bring everything back around into focus again.
FORTY-THREE